the sociology of intellectuals...of interests that intellectuals were duty-bound to avoid: nation,...

10 Jun 2002 9:52 AR AR163-04.tex AR163-04.SGM LaTeX2e(2002/01/18)P1: IKH10.1146/annurev.soc.28.110601.140745

Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2002. 28:63–90doi: 10.1146/annurev.soc.28.110601.140745

Copyright c© 2002 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

THE SOCIOLOGY OF INTELLECTUALS

Charles Kurzman and Lynn OwensDepartment of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill,North Carolina 27599-3210; e-mail: [email protected], [email protected]

Key Words academic, class-less, organic, professional, “new class”

■ Abstract The sociology of intellectuals has adopted three fundamentally distinctapproaches to its subject. The Dreyfusards, Julien Benda, “new class” theorists, andPierre Bourdieu treated intellectuals as potentially a class-in-themselves, that is, ashaving interests that distinguish them from other groups in society. Antonio Gram-sci, Michel Foucault, and theorists of “authenticity” treated intellectuals as primarilyclass-bound, that is, representatives of their group of origin. Karl Mannheim, EdwardShils, and Randall Collins treated intellectuals as relatively class-less, that is, able totranscend their group of origin to pursue their own ideals. These approaches dividedthe field at its founding in the 1920s, during its mid-century peak, and in its late-centuryrevival.

INTRODUCTION

The sociology of intellectuals, like its subjects of study, has had a checkered history.At times, the field seemed ready to emerge as a cohesive body of literature, just as itssubjects—variously defined in the literature as persons with advanced educations,producers or transmitters of culture or ideas, or members of either category whoengage in public issues—sometimes gelled into a cohesive social group. At othertimes, the field hardly existed and was subsumed into the sociology of professions,the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of science, and other fields—just asits subjects sometimes shunned the collective identity of intellectuals, preferringprofessional, middle-class, ethnic, and other identities. The field’s ebbs and flowshave not often matched those of its subjects, with the result that the sociologyof intellectuals is sometimes written in a normative key, attempting to call intoexistence a group that no longer rallies to the name “intellectual.”

Such was the field’s founding moment, in the late 1920s, when three ap-proaches to the subject emerged, treating intellectuals as a class-in-themselves,as class-bound, or as class-less (see also the categorizations in Brym 1980:12–13,1987, 2001; Gagnon 1987b:6–10, Szel´enyi & Martin 1988:649). These three ap-proaches are reflected in the three editions of theEncyclopedia of the Social Sci-ences: Michels (1932) adopting a class-in-itself approach, Shils (1968) adopting a

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class-less approach, and Brym (2001) adopting a class-bound approach. Our re-view of the field, focusing primarily on the English-language literature, is organizedaround these three approaches, discussing the updating of each approach duringthree waves of interest in the subject, in the 1920s, the 1950s, and the 1990s.

The Founding of the Field

In contrast to the first decade of the twentieth century, when the Dreyfus Affairsparked a positive and almost messianic collective identity among intellectualsaround the world (Kurzman 2003), intellectuals in the interwar period were char-acterized by disillusionment and de-identification. Roberto Michels, writing in1932 on “Intellectuals” for theEncyclopedia of the Social Sciences, characterizedhis subjects as “largely demoralized” and undergoing “an intense spiritual self-criticism” (Michels 1932:123–24). Theodor Adorno recalled the early 1920s asa period of “anti-intellectual intellectuals” seeking authenticity through religion(Adorno [1964] 1973:3–4).Edouard Berth, whose savage critique of intellectualsjust before World War I as “the harshest, the most nefarious, the most ruinousof aristocracies,” prefaced his second edition in 1926 with the pitiful image of“intellectual and moral prostration” beneath the plutocratic captains of industry(Berth 1926:74, p. 29). V. I. Lenin, who expressed high hopes before the war thatbourgeois intellectuals would turn revolutionary and enlighten the working class(Lenin [1902] 1975:24–25), now called them “not [the nation’s] brains but its shit”(Koenker & Bachman 1997:229). Leftist intellectuals in China adopted the slo-gan, “Down with the intellectual class” (Schwarcz 1986:186). “Intellectuals of allcountries, unite!” wrote Roger L´evy (1931:164). “Unite because the war [WorldWar I], which decimated you, has reduced the survivors to the wages of misery;unite because, among other workers, your brothers, you [survivors] dare to speakof the material conditions of your miserable lives, which are brightened only bythe will to learn or teach.”

At this low point in the collective history of the intellectuals, the sociologyof intellectuals emerged out of the long tradition of speculation on the subject(Plato [360 B.C.] 2000, Campanella [1602] 1981, Bacon [1627] 1989, Fichte[1794] 1988, Comte [1822] 1969, Bakunin [1870] 1950, Makha¨ıski [1899] 1979;see also Boggs 1993:15–27). Three approaches developed at this time, each dis-tinguished by its consideration of intellectuals as a class: one, pioneered byAntonio Gramsci, viewed intellectuals as bound to their class of origin; a second,associated with Karl Mannheim, treated intellectuals as potentially class-less; athird, popularized by Julien Benda, proposed that intellectuals form a class inthemselves.

INTELLECTUALS AS CLASS-IN-THEMSELVES Dreyfusard intellectuals claimed thatthey formed a class:

We alumni and alumnae of the colleges are the only permanent presencethat corresponds to the aristocracy in older countries. We have continuous


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traditions, as they have; our motto, too, isnoblesse oblige; and unlike them, westand for ideal interests solely, for we have no corporate selfishness and wieldno power of corruption. We sought to have our own class consciousness. “Lesintellectuels!” What prouder club name could there be than this one. (James1912:319)

This class was not based on its relation to the means of production, as in mostMarxist images of class at the time, but rather on itslack of relation to the meansof production. That is, intellectuals considered their interests to be coterminouswith the interests of society as a whole, precisely because they were free from thenarrowing of interest that the occupation of any particular position in the economyentailed.

[H]ere is an entire phalanx of people who not only conceive of general ideas,but for whom ideas determine the corresponding emotions, which in turndetermine their acts, which are, much of the time, directly opposed to theimmediate interest of the individual. Here is a lieutenant-colonel [GeorgesPicquart] who, through devotion to an abstaction, ruins his career, accepts threemonths of detention; a novelist [Emile Zola] who confronts the savagery of thecrowds; thousands of young men who sign manifestos that may compromisetheir future, perhaps even their security.. . . (Benda 1900:309)

The author of this paean to the intellectual anti-class, Julien Benda, later wrote whatwe take to be the founding document of the sociology of intellectuals,La Trahisondes clercs, translated into English asThe Treason of the Intellectuals(Benda [1927]1928). This work may be little known today but was influential at the time, goingthrough more than 50 editions in 20 years. The author defined his subjects as “allthose whose activity essentially isnot in the pursuit of practical aims, all those whoseek their joy in the practice of an art or a science or metaphysical speculation, inshort in the possession of non-material advantages, and hence in a certain mannersay: ‘My kingdom is not of this world’” (p. 43). Benda contrasted this groupwith “‘the laymen,’ whose function consists essentially in the pursuit of materialinterests” (p. 43).

The treason in Benda’s title referred to the failure of contemporary intellectu-als to uphold their anti-class. The Dreyfusard phalanx that Benda optimisticallydescribed in 1900 had succumbed to base “political passions” (p. 45), by whichBenda meant material interests. “The modern ‘clerk’ has entirely ceased to let thelayman alone descend to the market place,” he asserted (p. 46), and in descendingthey have “betrayed their duty, which is precisely to set up a corporation whosesole cult is that of justice and of truth” (p. 57). Benda repeatedly listed three setsof interests that intellectuals were duty-bound to avoid: nation, class, and race.He identified nationalism, predating the outbreak of World War I but acceleratingthereafter, as particularly pernicious. Contemporary intellectuals, he wrote, “de-clare that their thought cannot be good, that it cannot bear good fruit, unless theyremain rooted on their native soil, unless they are not ‘uprooted’” (p. 64). Benda


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worried that the break-up of the intellectual class might be permanent. “It is hardto imagine a body of men of letters (for corporative action becomes more andmore important) attempting to withstand the bourgeois classes instead of flatteringthem. It is still harder to imagine them turning against the tide of their intellectualdecadence and ceasing to think that they display a lofty culture when they sneerat rational morality and fall on their knees before history” (p. 194).

Despite its literary flavor and apocalyptic tone, Benda’s book encapsulatesmany of the themes of the class-in-itself approach to the sociology of intellectuals:Intellectuals can develop common interests that set them apart from other groupsin society. Intellectuals can organize around these interests sometimes and rejectsuch organization at other times.

INTELLECTUALS AS CLASS-BOUND Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist, crit-icized Benda’s famous book for ignoring “the function of the intellectuals in thelife of the state” (Gramsci [1932] 1995:470). Gramsci’s approach to the subject ofintellectuals began with a questioning of the Dreyfusard ideal: “Are intellectualsan autonomous and independent social group, or does every social group have itsown particular specialised category of intellectuals?” (Gramsci [1932] 1971:5).He quickly selected the second option:

Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essentialfunction in the world of economic production, creates together with itself,organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity andan awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in thesocial and political fields. (p. 5)

The bourgeoisie produced its intellectuals, and the proletariat produced its own.Both sets of intellectuals were “organic” to the extent that there was a “relationshipbetween the intellectuals and the world of production” (p. 12). Gramsci contrasted“organic” intellectuals with “traditional” intellectuals, exemplified by Catholicclerics, who “put themselves forward as autonomous and independent of the domi-nant social group” (p. 7). This self-conception was delusional—a “social utopia bywhich the [traditional] intellectuals think of themselves as ‘independent’” (p. 8)—but the bourgeoisie sought to eliminate even this fictional autonomy through “itsstruggle to assimilate and to conquer ‘ideologically’ the traditional intellectuals,”a process “made quicker and more efficacious the more the group in questionsucceeds in simultaneously elaborating its own organic intellectuals” (p. 10). Thevagaries of the intellectuals’ relations with the classes that produced them are thesubject of numerous scattered references throughout Gramsci’s prison notebooks(Gramsci [1929–1935] 1971).

Gramsci’s writings on intellectuals only became well-known a decade after hisdeath, when his prison notebooks were published. From the mid-twentieth centuryonward, while Benda was largely forgotten, Gramsci’s reputation has steadilyspread, and not only among Marxists. His work is commonly cited as an exemplarof the class-bound approach to the sociology of intellectuals: Intellectuals cannot



form a single group, but are divided into subsets that emerge from and serve othersocial groups.

INTELLECTUALS AS CLASS-LESS Karl Mannheim, an exiled Hungarian social-democrat, also distanced his sociology of intellectuals from Benda’s approach.Benda, he wrote, was “mistaken” in clinging to the “traditional cult of the exclu-sively self-oriented, self-sufficient intelligentsia”; the danger Benda saw in politi-cization lay rather in “the encapsulation of free thought under the constraint ofchurch, state or class organization” (Mannheim [1932] 1993:79).

Mannheim’s primary statement on the sociology of intellectuals, a section ofhis famous bookIdeology and Utopia, defined its subject by the ability to avoidsuch fetters: intellectuals were “not too firmly situated in the social order,” an“unanchored,relativelyclass-less stratum,” and “socially unattached” (Mannheim[1929] 1985:154–55), drawing on recent work by Max Weber (M. Weber [1919]1946) and Alfred Weber (A. Weber [1923] 1999). Mannheim rejected the viewthat “intellectuals constitute either a class or at least an appendage to a class”(p. 155)—the Dreyfusard and Marxist approaches, respectively. Rather, intellec-tuals transcended class, at least to a certain degree. Their education exposed themto “opposing tendencies in social reality, while the person who is not oriented to-ward the whole through his education, but rather participates directly in the socialprocess of production, merely tends to absorb theWeltanschauung[worldview]of that particular group” (p. 156). Education allowed intellectuals “to attach them-selves to classes to which they originally did not belong,” as “they and they alonewere in a position to choose their affiliation” (p. 158). As a result,

. . .unattached intellectuals are to be found in the course of history in all camps.Thus they always furnished the theorists for the conservatives who themselvesbecause of their own social stability could only with difficulty be brought totheoretical self-consciousness. They likewise furnished the theorists for theproletariat which, because of its social conditions, lacked the prerequisites forthe acquisition of the knowledge necessary for modern political conflict. Theiraffiliation with the liberal bourgeoisie has already been discussed. (Mannheim[1929] 1985, p. 158)

Affiliation did not imply utter subservience, Mannheim continued. Because of their“need for total orientation and synthesis,” their “broader point of view,” and their“interest in seeing the whole of the social and political structure,” intellectuals hada “mission” to encourage mutual understanding among classes and to “create aform outside of the party schools in which the perspective of and the interest inthe whole is safeguarded” (pp. 161–62). In later work, Mannheim worried that thismission was in jeopardy, and that “the decline of a relatively free intelligentsia” inthe twentieth century threatened “the comparative and critical approach which anatmosphere of multi-polar viewpoints stimulates” (Mannheim 1956:166).

These three approaches to the sociology of intellectuals may be summarized asfollows (Table 1):


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TABLE 1

Class-in-itself Class-bound Class-less

Founding figure: Benda Gramsci MannheimDo intellectuals sometimes Yes No Noform a distinct class?

Do intellectuals generally Yes No Yestranscend their class of origin?

These three approaches have continued to shape the field during subsequent wavesof interest in the subject.1

Mid-Century Attention

Scattered works on the sociology of intellectuals continued to appear in the 1940s,but the field surged in the late 1950s, as evidenced by the anthologies publishedsoon thereafter (de Huszar 1960, Rieff 1969). “Intellectuals are in fashion,” aFrench author noted (Bodin 1962:5, quoted in Nichols 1978:1). This wave coin-cided with a rise in the fortunes of intellectuals in many regions of the world. In theUnited States and Western Europe, the welfare state both expanded the intellectualclass and hired it to solve society’s problems (Bauman 1992, Bruce-Briggs 1979b).In Eastern Europe, intellectuals entered a “heroic age” (Shlapentokh 1990:105–48)of technocratic ascendancy (Konr´ad & Szelenyi 1979). In many newly independentcountries, intellectuals assumed leadership of the post-colonial state (Shils [1958]1972). The global upswing in student movements drew additional attention to therole of intellectuals in social change (Katsiaficas 1987, Kraushaar 1998), and anumber of studies emphasized the rise of educational attainment in contemporarystratification (Collins 1979, Sarfatti-Larson 1977, Young 1958).

INTELLECTUALS AS CLASS-LESS This approach came to dominate the field in the1950s. The structural-functionalist paradigm reserved a special role for intellec-tuals as “people specializing in cultural concerns and being, relatively speaking,relieved of responsibility for current societal functions”—that is, people concernedwith the meaning of symbolic systems rather than with the interaction and con-tention of social groups (Parsons 1969:11). Intellectuals, in this view, do not forma class and are “necessarilynot among the primary holders of political power orcontrollers of economic resources” (p. 23). Rather, they elaborate the symbolicsystem of all social groups—not as organic representatives of these groups, as inthe class-bound perspective, but as occupants of a role that emphasizes “universal-istic standards” (p. 14), “‘non-material’ factors of effective social action” (p. 21),

1These categories suggest a fourth possibility, in which intellectuals form a distinct classand do not transcend their class of origin. Such an image of hereditary castes of intellectualsdoes not play a large part in the sociology of intellectuals.



and “the double imperatives of the maximal (though always imperfect) objectivityof science and of seeking general theoretical and empirical solutions of problemsregardless of their bearing on the immediate problems of action” (p. 25).

Edward Shils, the leading figure in the field at this time, argued that the dis-juncture in the intellectuals’ role—between their universalistic ideals and society’smore mundane concerns—led frequently to intellectuals’ alienation. “It is prac-tically given by the nature of the intellectuals’ orientation that there should besome tension between the intellectuals and the value-orientations embodied in theactual institutions of any society” (Shils [1958] 1972:7). Other authors drew sim-ilar conclusions, likening intellectuals to explorers who “specialize, so to speak,in doing the unexpected” (Znaniecki 1940:165); or to court jesters and medievalfools, whose power “lies in [their] freedom with respect to the hierarchy of thesocial order” (Dahrendorf [1953] 1969:54). Still others emphasized intellectuals’rebelliousness (Aron [1955] 1957, Brinton [1938] 1965:39–49, Lipset & Dobson1972, Schumpeter 1942)—a concern that long predated structural-functionalism.Since the early 1800s, certain scholars worried that educational opportunitieswere expanding faster than appropriate jobs, creating a malcontented “intellec-tual proletariat,” detached by their education from their traditional station butunable to maintain the standard of living they believed they deserved (Barbagli[1974] 1982, Kotschnig 1937, O’Boyle 1970). Emile Durkheim blamed generaleducation, among other things, for the rise of anomie in modern society (Durkheim[1893] 1984:307; but see his defense of Dreyfusard intellectuals, Durkheim [1898]1973). Along similar lines, Seymour Martin Lipset (1959) noted that intellectualscould express anomic resentment even when their social status and employmentopportunities were favorable, as in the United States of the 1950s. As he and aco-author put it in a later essay, “To gain the participation of the intellectuals,power must offer more than bread, it must allow access to a court of glory” (Lipset& Basu 1975:465).

In addition to their critical tendencies, Shils also emphasized the intellectu-als’ frequent access to such a “court of glory.” In contrast with Parsons, Shilsnoted that intellectuals have at times “played a great historical role on the higherlevels of state administration”—mandarins, civil services, even philosopher-kings(Shils [1958] 1972:8–9). Shils published an extended study of one such instance,the intellectuals who came to rule India after decolonization (Shils 1961). Shilsviewed intellectuals in India, as in other decolonized states (Shils 1962:19–24), asthe cadre necessary to bring modernity to traditional societies. Yet for all his ap-preciation of the talents and achievements of India’s great intellectual-politiciansand intellectual-bureaucrats, Shils feared that too much involvement in the statewould undermine the intellectuals’ true role, namely that of responsible critic(Shils 1961:116). Robert K. Merton made a similar point with regard to New Dealintellectuals in the United States: When intellectuals participated in government,they lost the autonomy—“whether real or spurious”—associated with the intellec-tual role (Merton [1945] 1968:276). Still others considered intellectuals’ politicalparticipation to be a betrayal of the intellectual’s duty to transcend partisan com-mitments (KolÃakowski 1972, Molnar 1961).


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INTELLECTUALS AS CLASS-BOUND Various radical scholars viewed this call for in-tellectuals to be free of partisanship as a mystification of their role as spokespersonsfor the power elite. C. Wright Mills argued that intellectuals have succumbed to ca-reer pressures and “a fear which leads to self-intimidation. . . sometimes politelyknown as ‘discretion,’ ‘good taste,’ or ‘balanced judgment.’” As a result, “Themeans of effective communication are being expropriated from the intellectualworker. The material basis of his initiative and intellectual freedom is no longerin his hands” (Mills [1944] 1963:297; see also Mills [1959] 1963). Arlene KaplanDaniels called white male academics hardly “free of status bias” and therefore un-able to claim Mannheimian class-lessness (Daniels 1975:343–44). Noam Chomskydescribed bourgeois intellectuals as offering ideological apologies and a veneer oflegitimacy to the bourgeois state (Chomsky 1969, 1978).

Yet these critiques of class-lessness often aspired to class-lessness themselves.Mills juxtaposed the timidity of power-elite apologists with his own aspiration to“relate himself to the value of truth” and “responsibly cope with the whole of liveexperience” (Mills [1944] 1963:299). Daniels claimed for women and African-Americans the insightfulness of marginality that Mannheim had claimed for whitemale academics (Daniels 1975:344). Chomsky contrasted bourgeois intellectuals’subordination to the state with the “civilized norms” to which he presumablyaspired (Chomsky 1969:72).

Michel Foucault, in his enigmatic fashion, offered a class-bound theory forthe postmodern age. “The role of the intellectual is no longer to place himself a‘little ahead or a bit to the side’ so as to speak the silent truth to all,” he arguedagainst class-lessness. “Rather, it is to struggle against the forms of power in rela-tion to which he is both object and instrument: within the domain of ‘knowledge,’‘truth,’ ‘consciousness,’ and ‘discourse’” (Foucault & Deleuze [1972] 1973:104).The difference, he elaborated in another interview, lay in the distinction betweenthe “universal” intellectual, “a free subject. . . counterposed to the service of theState or Capital,” versus “specific” intellectuals, grounded “within specific sec-tors, at the precise points where their own conditions of life and work situatethem (housing, the hospital, the asylum, the laboratory, the university, family andsexual relations).” Specific intellectuals do not speak for truth in the abstract—Foucault broke here with the dominant French “universal” intellectual of the era,Jean-Paul Sartre—but only for the impact of general truth regimes in particularlocations. As with Gramsci, Foucault considered such grounded intellectuals tobe a potentially revolutionary force—not because they represent the oppressed, aswith Gramsci, but because they operate cogs in the power/knowledge machine andthus may expose and disable it (Foucault [1977] 1984:67–69; see also Bov´e 1986,Radhakrishnan 1990).

INTELLECTUALS AS CLASS-IN-THEMSELVES The heroic Dreyfusard image of the in-tellectual class-in-itself continued to dissipate at mid-century. Virtually the onlyexception to this trend was Lewis Coser, whose work was also exceptional inraising explicitly the central question for this approach: the circumstances underwhich “men of letters began to find conditions favorable to the emergence of a



self-conscious stratum of intellectuals with a peculiar ethos and sense of calling”(Coser [1965] 1970:xi; see also Lasch 1965:x). Coser identified a variety of insti-tutional settings that allowed intellectuals to gain class-like solidarity, includingsalons, coffeehouses, scientific societies, and commercial publishing (Chaps. 2–7).Yet an overabundance of institutional settings, too, could undermine solidarity, asin the United States in the mid-twentieth century, where intellectuals were frag-mented among universities, research institutes, government bureaucracies, mass-culture industries, and foundations (Chaps. 21–25), though Coser felt the countrymight be witnessing the emergence of “an official establishment culture” thatwould reintegrate intellectuals while de-fanging their critical legacy (Chap. 26).

Coser noted that intellectuals’ political ascendancy—he offered case studies ofthe French Jacobins and the Russian Bolsheviks, in particular—turned out badly:their “scientific millenarianism,” their enthusiasm to remake society along “ratio-nal” lines, involved monstrous abuses of power (Coser [1965] 1970:Chap. 13).This critique dominated the mainstream of class-in-itself research during this pe-riod: the related literatures on the intelligentsia (Pipes 1961) and the “new class”(Djilas 1957) in state socialism. Both terms were coined in the mid-nineteenthcentury, “intelligentsia” referring to Russia’s most alienated, radical intellectuals(Confino 1972, Nahirny 1983), and “new class” referring to the ruling class of afuture socialist state:

It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic,arrogant, and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a newhierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars, and the world willbe divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge and an immenseignorant majority. (Bakunin [1870] 1950:38, quoted in Szel´enyi & Martin1988:647)

Although Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas, who popularized the term “new class”in the 1950s, did not identify it with intellectuals, whom he considered just asoppressed as other groups under state socialism (Djilas 1957:45, 130, 135), theliteratures on the intelligentsia and the “new class” merged, placing intellectualsat the heart of the socialist administration (Gella 1976, Konr´ad & Szelenyi 1979,Szelenyi 1982b).

The “new class” thesis migrated to the West in the 1960s and 1970s (Bruce-Briggs 1979a; but see the precursor, Nomad 1937). Daniel Bell, for example,though he considered the concept of the “new class” to be “muddled” (Bell 1979),argued that socialist and capitalist societies are converging into a postindustrialcondition based on knowledge-work and ruled by highly educated planners. Bellwelcomed the “rise of the new elites based on skill,” who “are not bound by a suf-ficient common interest to make them a political class,” but share “norms of pro-fessionalism” that “could become the foundation of the new ethos for such a class”(Bell [1973] 1976:362). Alvin Gouldner’s optimism went further: The “new class,”he wrote, is the new “universal class,” albeit a flawed one, replacing the proletariat(Gouldner 1979:83–85). This class is composed of two groups—critical intellectu-als and technical intelligentsia—linked through common membership in a “culture


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of critical discourse” that gains authority not through force but through the powerof ideas, and that subverts “all establishments, social limits, and privileges, includ-ing its own” (p. 32). At the same time, this class has a special interest in rewardingits own form of cultural capital in an effort “to increase its own share of the nationalproduct; to produce and reproduce the special social conditions enabling them toappropriate privately larger shares of the incomes produced by the special culturesthey possess; to control their work and their work settings; and to increase theirpolitical power partly to achieve the foregoing” (pp. 19–20). The new class is thuscaught in tension between its universalistic aspirations and particularistic interests(Szelenyi 1982a)—a tension that Gouldner explored in his posthumously publishedstudy of Marx and other Marxist intellectuals, documenting their privileged socialbackgrounds and their sometimes contemptuous treatment of their working-classco-conspirators, all in the name of socialist revolution (Gouldner 1985).

Gouldner’s work was controversial. Some questioned whether the new classformed a class. Survey analyses found a distinct new class of young social andcultural workers in the Netherlands (Kriesi 1989), but it was debatable whether adistinct class could be discerned in U.S. data (Brint 1984, Lamont 1987a). A qual-itative project comparing the United States and several West European countriesconcluded that the new class was difficult to distinguish from contemporary bour-geois culture (Kellner & Heuberger 1992). In a more hostile vein, Wrong ([1983]1998) argued that classes in general were an anachronistic irrelevancy, and thatGouldner’s conception of “new class,” in particular, was not new, not a class, andnot significant (see also Pryor 1981). Speaking from the perspective of intellectualclass-lessness, Wrong argued that “the conception of ‘intellectuals’ or ‘the intel-lectual community’ as speaking out on most issues with a single voice, let aloneforming a coherent class, even with purely self-serving political aims, is likely topass from the scene” (Wrong 1998:129). Some questioned whether the new classwas coming to power; in the words of one critic, “Its members are bit playerswho do not even choose their own lines” (Hacker 1979:167; also Fridjónsdottir1987). And some challenged the intellectuals’ universalistic pretensions. Ehren-reich & Ehrenreich (1979), for example, argued that intellectuals form part of anew “professional-managerial class” whose “objective class interest” lies in chal-lenging the capitalist class, although not necessarily to benefit the working class(see also the responses to this argument in Walker 1979). Etzioni-Halevy (1985)called them “prophets who failed,” whose track record of societal improvement isnot nearly so rosy as their self-interested claims (see also many of the essays inBruce-Briggs 1979c, and Johnson 1988:342)—a sentiment pithily captured by theFrench neologism “intellocrates” (Hamon & Rotman 1981).

The “new class” concept faded in popularity, as Wrong predicted (Frentzel-Zagorska & Zagorska 1989). One of its most prominent proponents came to havesecond thoughts, backing away from the concept, suggesting that the muddle ofprevious theoretical formulations reflected the incompleteness and failure of thenew class’s political projects, and urging a reorientation of study around a “generaltheory of symbolic domination” (Martin & Szelényi 1987, Szelényi 1986–1987,Szelenyi & Martin 1988).



Late-Century Developments

The sociology of intellectuals gained a new momentum in the last years of thetwentieth century, as evidenced by numerous collected volumes (Ashraf 2001,Dennis 1997a, Eyerman et al. 1987, Fink et al. 1996, Gagnon 1987, Jennings &Kemp-Welch 1997, Kellner & Heuberger 1992, Lawrence & D¨obler 1996, Lemert1991, Maclean et al. 1990, Mohan 1987, Robbins 1990, Suny & Kennedy 1999),but intellectuals themselves did not. Bauman (1987) called their fate “the fallof the legislator”—the loss of intellectuals’ confidence in their ability to discernand promulgate a rational vision for society. In the United States, longstandinganti-intellectualism (Hofstadter 1963) deepened in “culture wars” that called intoquestion the intellectuals’ right to engage in autonomous cultural production (Mc-Gowan 2002, Ross 1989). Britain, whose intellectuals had long been “absent” asa class (Anderson [1968] 1992, Turner 1994:154), entered “a distinct climate ofanti-intellectualism” (Dominelli & Hoogvelt 1996:60). Even France, the birthplaceof modern intellectual identity, witnessed “disenchantment” (Hourmant 1997) andthe “flames of anti-intellectualism” (Bodin 1997:8). But this process was uneven.In some communities—we discuss African-Americans and the Middle East—intellectuals retained or even gained stature. The study of intellectuals in thesecommunities often involved first-person implications, while other studies tookthird-person tacks, examining intellectuals in historical or foreign settings. Muchof the literature thus achieved a measure of distance from its subjects. The threeapproaches to intellectuals with which we have organized this literature reviewbecame less hard-and-fast in this period, though still salient and useful.

INTELLECTUALS AS CLASS-LESS Recent work in this approach has shifted from anemphasis on intellectuals’ roles in society to their roles within the intellectualworld. Ahmad Sadri (1992), for example, identified four ideal types of intellec-tuals, forming a 2× 2 table: other-worldly versus this-worldly, and paradigm-founders versus paradigm-followers (Sadri 1992:109). Sadri derived this catego-rization from Max Weber’s analyses of religion and politics, focusing on twopremises: that intellectual life is relatively autonomous from its social context, andthat ideas may feed back to affect the material “base” (pp. 58–59). Sadri transferredthese insights from the world of ideas to intellectuals as the carriers and proponentsof such ideas. In this way, Sadri continued the class-less approach pioneered byMannheim, although he was at pains to distinguish his discussion of intellectualautonomy from Mannheim’s, which he considered ideologically committed to theformation of an intellectual class (p. 150). Scott (1997), taking a similar positionof intellectual class-lessness, inverted the theoretical legacy, claiming that Weber’sunderstanding of intellectuals as “servants” was too narrow and class-bound, whileMannheim’s understanding of intellectual freedom was not far off the mark.

Randall Collins’ massive work onThe Sociology of Philosophies(Collins 1998)also began from similar premises of intellectual autonomy. Intellectuals have a“detachment from ordinary concerns” (p. 19), and “intellectual discourse focusesimplicitly on its autonomy from external concerns and its reflexive awarenessof itself” (p. 26). This autonomy is not absolute: “External conditions rearrange


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material bases for intellectual occupations, and these in turn lead to restructur-ing networks, generating new alliances and oppositions in the attention space”(p. 552). Yet Collins stressed that “One layer does not reduce to another; least ofall do the contents of the philosophies”—the field on which Collins focused hisstudy—“reduce to the outermost material and political conditions” (p. 622).

The contests that determine intellectual careers operate, Collins argued, accord-ing to patterns specific to intellectuals. In particular, Collins identified two over-arching patterns: a “law of small numbers” that “limits how many positions canreceive widespread attention” (pp. 38–40, 81–82), and a “clustering of contempo-raneous creativity” in which “philosophers of a similar level of creative eminence”tend “to cluster in the same generations” (pp. 883–89). In the approximately 75generations since philosophy began to be recorded in writing, Collins countedalmost 2700 philosophers, but the greatest of these were not dispersed randomlythroughout history. Collins identified hot spots in which three or more major orsecondary figures within a given cultural tradition coincided in a single generation(pp. 57–58). Collins’s analysis of these hot spots focuses on the importance of ri-valry within intellectual networks and on the “emotional energy of creativity” that“is concentrated at the center of networks, in circles of persons encountering oneanother face to face. The hot periods of intellectual life, those tumultuous goldenages of simultaneous innovations, occur when several rival circles intersect at afew metropoles of intellectual attention and debate” (pp. 379–80). Unlike Merton’s([1961] 1973) analysis of simultaneous scientific discoveries, which emphasizedconsensus born of a shared social setting, Collins emphasized conflict—in keepingwith his previous identity as propagator of “conflict theory” (Collins [1985] 1994).

INTELLECTUALS AS CLASS-BOUND Radical scholars continued to draw onGramsci’s concept of organic intellectuals, dividing intellectuals by their classposition and calling for a more activist role by those who represent the oppressedclasses (Boggs 1984, Kellner 1997, Said 1994, Sassoon 2000, Strine 1991). Casestudies included the literature on policy intellectuals, whose service to the statewas viewed, in this approach, as legitimating bourgeois interests (Domhoff 1999,Lawrence 1996, Smith 1991; for contrasting views emphasizing policy intellectu-als’ potential class-lessness, see Gattone 2000, Ollauson 1996).

Three debates have advanced the class-bound approach in recent years: underwhat conditions do intellectuals aspire to organicity; what does it mean for an intel-lectual to be “organic” in a community; and can intellectuals construct the commu-nity in which they claim to be organic? Crucial cases for these debates have beenthe Middle East, the African-American community, and nationalism, respectively.

Several scholars adopting the class-bound approach raised the question: underwhat conditions do intellectuals aspire to organicity? Jerome Karabel proposed aseries of conditions that make intellectuals more likely to align themselves withsubordinate social groups, a list drawing on social-movement theory: organizedand sharply defined allies, weak but repressive elites, high ratios of intellectuals“relatively unattached” to large-scale organizations, and well-grounded culturalrepertoires of resistance to authority (Karabel 1996:211–14). Boggs (1993) argued



that the logic of capitalist rationalization generated its own dialectic opposition, thedivision between technocratic and critical intellectuals, which expressed itself inthe new social movements of the 1960s and afterward. Other case studies includedBoggs (1987), Pasquinelli (1995), and Salamini (1989) on Italy, Petras & Morley(1990) on Latin America, and Brym (1977, 1978, 1980, 1988) on Jewish Marxist in-tellectuals in the Russian empire in the early twentieth century. Brym elaborated hisapproach in a series of works over the past quarter century. Like Collins’s sociologyof intellectuals, Brym focused on networks (Brym 1980, 1987, 2001). However,Brym’s networks lead outside of the group, while Collins’s networks are internalto the group. In recent work, Brym emphasized the compatibility of Collins’s ap-proach (and Bourdieu’s, which we cover under the class-in-itself approach) withhis own (Brym 2001). Yet one might as easily emphasize the distinctions: whereasCollins emphasized the relative autonomy of intellectuals’ networks, Brym em-phasized intellectuals’ embeddedness in the class system. Citing Gramsci againstMannheim, Brym examined in particular the case of Jewish Marxist intellectualsin the Russian empire in the early twentieth century, whose political positions werea function of their linkages with the working class (Brym 1977, 1978, 1980, 1988).

The Middle East has been the scene of considerable debate on this issue of in-tellectuals’ becoming organic, though the Gramscian term itself is rarely used. Theterm most often used instead is “authenticity,” which intellectuals in the region aresaid to have lost and regained over the past century. After World War II, and espe-cially in the 1960s, Arab intellectuals turned to a “quasi-magical identification withthe great period of classical Arabian culture,” according to the famous critique ofAbdallah Laroui ([1974] 1976:156; see also Charnay 1973, Milson 1972). In Iran,too, the turn to authenticity accelerated in the 1960s, when intellectuals rejectedearlier Western-oriented ideologies and adopted slogans such as “gharbzadegi(thestate of being struck by the West)” and “return to one’s (original and authentic)self” (Gheissari 1998:88, 106). Mehrzad Boroujerdi refers to this movement as“the tormented triumph of nativism,” whose call for “collective consciousness” ap-pealed to Iranian intellectuals suffering from atomism and insecurity (Boroujerdi1996:178). In Turkey, the process occurred a bit later, in the 1970s and 1980s,with prominent Muslim intellectuals rejecting the European-derived identity ofentelektuel in favor of the more authentic identity ofaydın, or enlightened one(Meeker 1991:202). The irony of these claims of authenticity, noted some timeago by Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1955) and repeated by later authors, is that theirvery expression is, in its own terms, inauthentic, being the product of contact withthe West. Whether through competition with traditionally trained religious schol-ars, or increasing self-confidence, or changing global trends, many intellectualsin Iran (Ashraf 2001, Jahanbegloo 2000, Richard 1990) and elsewhere in the Is-lamic world (Federspiel 1998, Kurzman 1998, Sagiv 1995) have recently begunto downplay authenticity and emphasize global themes of democracy and rights.

What does it mean for an intellectual to be “organic”? Class-bound analysesworried about the relations between organic intellectuals and their class of ori-gin (Karabel 1976, Said 1994, Sassoon 2000), and the issue has been central toAfrican-American intellectual debates ever since W. E. B. Du Bois called for


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a college-educated “talented tenth” of the African-American community to “bemade leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people.. . . TheNegro race, like all other races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men”(Du Bois 1903:75; see also Dennis 1997b). The talented tenth shared much ofthe culture and treatment that other African-Americans experienced, yet in recentyears, some scholars have questioned Du Bois’s conception of the relationshipbetween “exceptional” intellectuals and the rest of the African-American commu-nity (Dennis 1997a). Some noted the marginal position that intellectuals occupywithin the community, and the suspicion with which they are sometimes regarded(Watts 1994, West 1985). Others wrestled with the issue of celebrity (Young 1997;see also Debray [1979] 1981 on a similar issue in France), or charged that intel-lectuals had abandoned the African-American community in favor of career ad-vancement (Rivers 1995). Others argued that certain African-Americans unfairlydominated intellectual practice—men, for example, according to black feministcritiques (Collins [1990] 2000, hooks & West 1990, James 1997). These interven-tions sought not to remove African-American intellectuals from prominence in thecommunity, but to urge greater inclusiveness and representativeness. At the sametime, as the number of African-American intellectuals grows, pressure for them tobe spokespersons for the race may be decreasing, allowing them to speak to moreindividual experiences (Banks 1996).

Can intellectuals construct the group in which they are “organic”? If so, thenGramsci’s formulation may be turned on its head: Instead of groups producingtheir own organic intellectuals, intellectuals may be producing their own organicgroups. Eyerman (1994), for example, suggested that “movement intellectuals”—citing Gramsci, but generalizing from class movements to all social movements—help to “constitute” groups, sometimes “tragically or as farce,. . . projecting onto movements their own needs and fantasies,” but sometimes helping “to uncoverdeep-seated needs and interests” (Eyerman 1994:198). This issue has been centralto debates over nationalism. The scholarly literature on the subject has generallyrecognized intellectuals as the catalysts of nationalist ideologies and movements(Anderson [1985] 1991, Hobsbawm 1990, Smith 1971, Suny & Kennedy 1999).Yet the literature has disagreed over causality: whether nationalism emerges frompre-existing communities, with intellectuals playing only the role of midwife, orwhether nationalism involves reconfigured communities that intellectuals havefoisted upon the world. The latter view might be expressed in a positive tone—a“functioning intellectual group. . . is a vital condition for nation-building” (Alatas1977:15)—but it has more often been expressed in critical terms. Giesen (1998),for example, suggested that intellectuals built German nationalism to gain politicalpower commensurate with their culture and education, and only became organiconce they had succeeded. Similarly, Dupay (1991) argued that Caribbean intellec-tuals framed independence movements in terms of fighting for “the people,” thenpositioned themselves against the rest of the population once they came to powerafter decolonization. Such moves do not always succeed. In Nigeria, Williams(1998) proposed, intellectuals were coopted by the state, failed to gain real power,



and turned eventually to the pro-democracy opposition movement. Likewise inRomania, Palade (2000) argued, intellectuals’ promotion of nationalism served tosuppress movements in opposition to Communist rule, prolonging the intellectu-als’ own subservience to the state. In all of these cases, intellectuals appear to havegenerated their own organic collective identities.

INTELLECTUALS AS CLASS-IN-THEMSELVES All of the class-bound approaches, DickPels (2000) has argued, involve the “metonymic fallacy of the intellectuals,” that is,they succumb “to the universal danger that resides in the very logic of speaking forothers: which is to disregard that inevitable hiatus between representers and rep-resented, or the specific sociological ‘strangeness’ which separates spokespersonsfrom the subjects or objects they claim to speak for” (p. x). Intellectuals, Pels wrote,are professional “strangers,” whose class interest it is to protect their “estrange-ment” from the state, the market, and even—for some he called “Bohemians”—theuniversity (Pels 1995, 1999, 2000). Echoing Benda, Pels suggested that these formsof estrangement grant intellectuals an authority needed in contemporary politics.In a similar vein, Goldfarb (1998) also focused on the structural position of intel-lectuals, arguing that intellectuals are particularly able to address the pressing needof democracies to deliberate over common problems, to cultivate civility in publiclife, and to promote the subversion of restrictive common sense. There is someevidence that intellectuals have at times served as the social basis of democratiza-tion, specifically in the first and last decades of the twentieth century (Kurzman &Leahey 2002), yet further empirical work is needed to evaluate this rosy scenario.

If intellectuals form, at least potentially, a class, when and how do they do so?Recent work has begun to tackle this central question. Disco (1987:62–68) ap-proached the issue of class formation in theoretical terms, focusing on the processof “social closure” by which intellectuals may rally to set discrete group bound-aries, allowing them to reap returns on their cultural or human capital (see alsoAronowitz 1990, Aronowitz & DiFazio 1994, Bauman 1992, Murphy 1988:16–21;on social closure more generally, see Manza 1992, Murphy 1988). Brint’s (1994)survey of leading intellectuals and periodicals in the United States in the late 1980sfound that norms of professionalism—one form of social closure—were displac-ing norms of social change. The returns on closure may be valuable indeed. Ina provocative book that might revive the “new class” thesis, Hodges (2000) esti-mated that “professionals’ pelf,” the feudal-style “tribute” that intellectuals extractby virtue of their claims to expertise” (p. 17), increased massively in the UnitedStates in the last quarter of the twentieth century and amounted to more than a tril-lion dollars in the mid-1990s—more than double the profits extracted from laborby capitalists (pp. 109–13). The intellectuals “have yet to formulate an ideologyexpressive of their unique class interests” (p. 162), but “the issues dividing thempale in comparison with the privileges they have in common and their underlyinghostility toward labor as the chief threat to those privileges” (p. 174).

Several case studies of intellectuals’ solidarity have attracted particular schol-arly attention, including the “New York intellectuals” (Bloom 1986, Cooney 1986,


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Jacoby 1987, Jumonville 1991, Laskin 2000, Teres 1996, Wald 1987) and in-tellectuals in post-Mao China (Calhoun 1994, Cherrington 1997, English-Lueck1997, Hao 2002, Lin 1999, Liu 2001, Mok 1998). The most intensively studiedcase involved the collapse of state socialism and its aftermath in Eastern Europe.Rather than focus on the role of the “new class” in the socialist state, these authorsemphasized the oppositional identity that intellectuals developed in Czechoslo-vakia (Karabel 1995), East Germany (Andrews 1998, Joppke 1995, Torpey 1995),Hungary (Machecewicz 1997, Bozóki 1994), Poland (Karabel 1993, Kennedy1990), and the Soviet Union (Garcelon 1997, Kagarlitsky 1988). This identityfractured in the post-Communist era, according to a variety of studies, with someintellectuals adopting statist or professional identities that have undermined whatsolidarity existed at the transitional moment (Börocz 1991, Eyal & Townsley 1995,Greenfield 1996, Kennedy 1992, Kurczewski 1997, Mokrzycki 1995; for a con-trasting approach to this phenomenon, emphasizing post-Communist intellectuals’“free-floating” class-lessness, see Coser 1996).

With the work of Pierre Bourdieu, we return full circle to Benda’s approach.Bourdieu expressed contempt for the sociology of intellectuals, which he called“very often the mere conversion of an interested and partial vision of the weak-nesses of one’s intellectual opponents into a discourse that has all the trappings ofscience” (Bourdieu 1989a:4); “neither the ‘sociology of the intellectuals,’ whichis traditionally the business of ‘right-wing intellectuals,’ nor the critique of ‘right-wing thought,’ the traditional speciality of ‘left-wing intellectuals,’ is anythingmore than a series of symbolic aggressions which take on additional force whenthey dress themselves up in the impeccable neutrality of science.” Each side, heargued, “fails to include the point of view from which it speaks and so fails toconstruct the game as a whole” (Bourdieu [1979] 1984:12). More specifically,Bourdieu distanced himself from the class-less and class-bound approaches to thesubject. Notions of intellectual class-lessness, he wrote, are self-deluding: “Theideology of the utopian thinker, rootless and unattached, ‘free-floating’, withoutinterests or profits,. . . scarcely inclines intellectuals to conceptualize the sense ofsocial position, still less their own position” (Bourdieu [1979] 1984:472). Bourdieuwas equally dismissive of the “myth of the ‘organic intellectual’” (Bourdieu1989b:109) and of intellectuals who have become “‘fellow travelers’—not of theproletariat but of second-rate intellectuals claiming to speak on behalf of the pro-letariat” (Bourdieu 1989b:103).

Bourdieu’s alternative approach was to describe the properties of the “intellec-tual field” as a whole (Bourdieu 1989a,b, 1990). The intellectual field is hardlyunanimous and consensual, as it comprises numerous subfields, strict hierarchies,and virulent conflict—indeed, Bourdieu acknowledged “the tendency inscribedin the very logic of the intellectual field towards division and particularism”(Bourdieu 1989b:109), and his extended study of French humanities and socialscience faculties during the revolt of 1968 emphasized the political implications ofdifferent positions in the academic field (Bourdieu [1984] 1988). For Bourdieu-inspired surveys of intellectual fields, see Börocz & Southworth (1996) onHungary, Lamont (1987b,c, 1992) on France and the United States, McLaughlin



(1998) on the United States, Rahkonen & Roos (1993) on Finland, Ringer (1992)on France and Germany, circa 1890–1920, and Verdery (1991) on Romania.

Yet Bourdieu’s concept of “field” also stressed the shared interests of actors inthe field, however grave their disagreements. In place of a definition, Bourdieu gavethe analogy of a game: “Players agree, by the mere fact of playing, and not by wayof a ‘contract,’ that the game is worth playing, that it is ‘worth the candle,’ and thiscollusionis the very basis of their competition” (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992:98).The value of the game lies in the appropriation and exploitation of specific formsof capital (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992:108). In the case of intellectuals, this formis “cultural capital,” perhaps Bourdieu’s most influential contribution to worldsociology, whose meaning may be approximated, if not defined, by Bourdieu’susage of the term to refer to familiarity with, appreciation of, and participation inhigh-culture art and science (Bourdieu [1979] 1984).2

The analogy of capital foregrounded intellectuals’ material self-interest (Swartz1998). Culture, in Bourdieu’s scheme, is something one invests in and reaps profitfrom. Intellectuals with high levels of cultural capital and low levels of economiccapital, for example, seek “maximum ‘cultural profit’ for minimum economic cost”by consuming inexpensive avant-garde art that only they understand, sneering atthe philistine tastes of the wealthy (Bourdieu [1979] 1984:270, 282). Intellectualsalso share an “invariable” interest in autonomy, Bourdieu later wrote, going so faras to define intellectuals in part through their membership in “an intellectually au-tonomous field, one independent of religious, political, economic or other powers”(Bourdieu 1989b:102, 99; see Sabour 1996).

Yet intellectuals’ self-interest coincides, at least potentially, with universal in-terests. Intellectuals, according to Bourdieu, are the bearers of universal reason(Bourdieu 1975, 1991). He offered three reasons why this should be so: (a) be-cause they are dominated by the wealthy, intellectuals “feel solidarity with anyand all the dominated, despite the fact that, being in possession of one of themajor means of domination, cultural capital, they partake of the dominant order;”(b) the intellectual field has traditionally rewarded “the defense of universal causes,”so that “it is possible to rely on the symbolic profits associated with these actionsto mobilize intellectuals in favor of the universal;” and (c) intellectuals have a“monopoly” on critical reflexivity, which allows them to examine their own “in-terest in disinterestedness,” and thus to transcend their position of privilege through“struggle for theuniversalization of the privileged conditions of existencewhichrender the pursuit of the universal possible” (Bourdieu 1989b:109–10; see alsoBourdieu [1980] 1993).

According to Bourdieu, intellectuals comprise a class fraction—specifically, adominated fraction of the dominant class. Yet this class fraction, despite its sharedinterests, does not often act collectively. Only at particular moments in history haveintellectuals transcended the political pessimism of pure culture (class-lessness, in

2While intellectuals are reliant upon cultural capital, they are not the only people with highlevels of it, and Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural capital in general may be distinct from hisanalysis of intellectuals.


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our terms) and the political hypocrisy of engagement (class-boundness) to mobi-lize in defense of their own interests—most prominently, Bourdieu proposed, inthe Dreyfus Affair (Bourdieu 1989b:99–101). Bourdieu called for a revival of intel-lectual solidarity—“an International of Intellectuals”—in defense of intellectuals’corporate interests. Only when these interests are protected, Bourdieu argued,will intellectuals be free to promote universal ideals (Bourdieu 1989b:97–99).One century after the Dreyfus Affair rallied intellectuals on behalf of a FrenchJew, Bourdieu founded an activist group, “Raisons d’Agir” (Reasons to Act),to rally intellectuals against neoliberal globalization. Borrowing language fromBourdieu’s publications, the organization’s web site described itself as “a smallgroup of researchers [who] felt the need to give more social and political force towork, research, reflection, and analysis that contradicts dominant discourses, inparticular the economic discourses broadcast daily on television” (Raisons d’Agir2000a). “It is also the outline for an autonomous intellectual collective capable ofintervening in the political field. . . [and] the collective invention of a new type ofpolitical engagement for intellectuals” (Raisons d’Agir 2000b).

Bourdieu’s approach differed from the Dreyfusards, and from later class-in-itself approaches, in its open admission and defense of intellectuals’ self-interest.Yet it recalled the Dreyfusard campaign in its self-conscious mobilization of in-tellectuals, and in its identification of intellectuals with universal ideals. At theend of the twentieth century, the sociology of intellectuals abounded with Benda-like complaints about other intellectuals’ treasonous passivity and their lack ofpolitical responsibility (Maclean et al. 1990), in particular around the theme ofthe “public intellectual,” whose demise was decried as a betrayal of intellectuals’ideals (Donatich 2001, Jacoby 1987, 1999).

The Twenty-First Century

We do not expect that the three approaches we have outlined in this essay will beconsolidated or transcended, as they begin from distinct premises. Yet respectfulcross-talk and cross-fertilization may be on the increase, as demonstrated, for ex-ample, by Collins’s and Bourdieu’s shared use of the concept of “cultural capital”—though the former has used it primarily to distinguish positions within the intellec-tual field, while the latter has used it also to distinguish intellectuals from othersin society. In addition, the three approaches to the sociology of intellectuals facea series of common concerns. We wish to highlight four avenues for exploration.

CONTESTED DEFINITIONS Readers may have noticed that this review essay doesnot expend much effort in defining “intellectuals”—an approach shared by Bour-dieu (1989a:4), who suggested that cut-and-dried definitions end up “destroyinga central property of the intellectual field, namely, that it is the site of strugglesover who does and does not belong to it.” We propose that defining intellectuals isless important than exploring how intellectuals define themselves, and are definedby others, in particular historical situations. Bauman (1987:8) has emphasized thespecial trait of such definitions, “which makes them also different from all other



definitions: they are all self-definitions,” intended to create a boundary with thedefiner on the inside. Yet intellectual identity can also be ascribed by outsiders, andin hostile climates the label “intellectual” (or “egghead” or other synonyms) maydamage a politician, a novelist, even an academic—as in the case of a historian whowas denied tenure, according to a senior member of his department, in part because“he cared more about being an intellectual than about studying intellectual history.”

MATERIAL CONDITIONS The sociology of intellectuals has generated two im-ages of intellectuals’ material conditions: in one image, intellectuals are surplus-extractors and relatively autonomous; in another, they are proletarianized and sub-jugated to the logic of the market or the state. The polemics that surround theseimages have rarely confronted one another in empirical research. We propose thatsuch a confrontation might fruitfully take a comparative approach: comparing in-tellectuals with other social groups, and comparing intellectuals in one setting(geographic, sectoral, or temporal) with intellectuals in another. Whether or notthe intellectuals in these settings self-identify as such, one might examine—forexample—how North American sociologists who study intellectuals today com-pare, in terms of control over their labor and remuneration, with those who did soa half-century ago.

CHANGING MEDIA Much intellectual communication is mediated by the media,and changes in the media environment may disproportionately affect intellectuals.Coser ([1965] 1970) and others noted the importance of print technology for theemergence of public spheres associated with modern intellectual communities, andKellner (1997) has suggested that ongoing revolution in electronic media may becreating similar opportunities. For example, the Internet offers intellectuals newlines of communication and opportunities to control their published output (Roberts1999, Sosteric 1996). Yet new media present potential threats to intellectuals aswell. Benjamin ([1955] 1969), for example, suggested that mechanical reproduc-tion destroys the “aura” of art and intellectual work, and Bourdieu ([1996] 1998)has argued that television turns intellectuals’ discursive advantage—sustained at-tention and nuanced analysis—into a disadvantage. The “information explosion”on the Internet may undermine intellectuals’ claims of expertise. These and otherissues relating to intellectuals in changing media contexts seem ripe for systematicand comparative study.

IDEOLOGICAL TENSIONS Intellectuals often exhibit a tension between elitism andegalitarianism. On an ideological plane, this tension may take the form of ar-guments against human domination that aspire to discursive domination. In thepolitical plane, the tension may mean gaining and using power in order to erase(other people’s) power. Hostile observers dismiss the egalitarian element in viewof the elitist element; sympathetic observers downplay the elitist in favor of theegalitarian, or argue—as Bourdieu has—that intellectuals’ self-interest may evenfurther egalitarian goals. Yet intellectuals’ self-interest has not always played it-self out so fortunately, and it strikes us as important to understand how elitism and


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egalitarianism have been resolved, or remained unresolved, in particular historicaljunctures. The sociology of intellectuals has frequently taken a normative form,offering visions of how intellectuals ought to behave. We recognize the legitimacyof exhortatory tropes, and we have covered many such works in this review. Yetwe wish to encourage the study of intellectuals’ actual practice, as well.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Judith Blau, Charles Gattone, Jerome Karabel, Jeff Manza, John LeviMartin, and Dick Pels for their assistance.

The Annual Review of Sociologyis online at http://soc.annualreviews.org

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